Booked Up, with Seth Colter Walls: An Incredibly Un-Fun Misreading of David Foster Wallace that Katie Roiphe Should Never Do Again

Have you ever loved a writer
or book real hard? So hard that when someone got her or him-or
it-all wrong, it was like you’d just been gutted? Well, then:
the Katie Roiphe essay, from this weekend’s New York
Times Book Review.

There are some things to admire here. Chief among them is her
argument that a lot of contemporary dude fiction is pretty flaccid
stuff. Consider all those fish effectively barrel-shot. And I’m
also on board for championing the virtues of erotic ecstasy that
are there to be found in mid-century dude fiction. This is
less-obvious ground to be treading, these days. (And yes, even if
it was mannered and self-conscious in its time, and can look stale
today, the “virility” of Mailer, Updike et al remains a
legit-if-narrow form of erotic ecstasy. Not for everyone: but
different blowjobs for different folks, etc.) Though really now:
David Foster Wallace does not belong in an essay about the
droopy-dicked tendencies of Benjamin Kunkel and Jonathan Safran
Foer.

In the parenthetical where she first mentions Wallace’s review
of a late-period Updike novel, Roiphe writes: “(Recounting one such
denunciation, David Foster Wallace says a friend called Updike
‘just a penis with a thesaurus’).” Now, if one were using this as a
piece of evidence with regard to Wallace’s ostensible pivot,
sexytime-wise, away from all things Updike may have ever stood for,
here might be a good point to ask does Wallace himself subscribe
to this view that he has quoted? Hell, let’s just go look at
the page in question, from Consider the Lobster, via
Amazon.com’s “look inside this book” feature.

This bit, halfway up the page from the “penis/thesaurus” line,
is hardly useful for Roiphe’s clean division between old and new
male lit stars: “… I’d like to offer assurances that your reviewer
is not one of those spleen-venting spittle-spattering Updike haters
one often encounters among literary readers under forty…. I do
believe that The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm, and The
Centaur are all great books, maybe classics.” Point…
incoherence? Certainly not Point Roiphe.

It’s not the only time Roiphe mis- or under-reads Wallace’s
Updike essay (or Infinite Jest, either).

She writes: “In this same essay, Wallace goes on to attack
Updike and, in passing, Roth and Mailer for being narcissists. But
does this mean that the new generation of novelists is not
narcissistic?”

Let’s return to the Wallace essay Roiphe wants to summarize. Is
it true that Wallace fails to note or distinguish the narcissism of
a past era versus the narcissism of the present one-such that it’s
appropriate for a gotcha transition in an overbroad trend
piece?

No. Just no. Here’s Wallace again, in the same essay, which runs
all of eight pages (and is therefore not his most difficult work
for readers to bear the responsibility of completing): “But I think
the deep reason so many of my generation dislike Updike and the
other GMN’s [Great American Narcissists] has to do with these
writers’ radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical
celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their
characters.” (Emphasis added, since it seems like an important,
qualifying word.) Wallace expands on the difference between
different generational approaches to narcissism on the next page,
when he writes:

But young adults of the nineties–many of whom are, of course,
the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces
Updike wrote about so beautifully, and who got to watch all this
brave new individualism and sexual freedom deteriorate into the
joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation-today’s
subforties have very different horrors, prominent among which are
anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the
prospect of dying without even once having loved something more
than yourself.

This is all much more complex than Roiphe gives it credit for
being, perhaps because she’s too busy shoehorning Wallace into a
fraternity of lesser writers with whom he does not belong. I doubt
even Eggers himself-who wrote a self-deprecating intro to the 10th
anniversary edition of Infinite Jest-would put his
Roiphe-pilloried novel You Shall Know Our Velocity! up
against either of Wallace’s. And I say that as someone who likes
Eggers in general, disliked his first novel, and is looking forward
to opening, eventually, that grandly (if unsustainably-conceived)
newspaper that is McSweeney’s 33. (I mean, just to make my
point a little more overt: my dream, as a currently single person,
is that I could share the different sections of McSweeneys 33 over
a pot of coffee with a smart woman on some soon-to-come lazy Sunday
morning. And then after passing it back and forth for a couple of
hours, we’d go have hot sex. Because I’m pretty sure that would be
an ecstasy I’m not at all “too cool” to admit wanting as a
twenty-nine-year-old.)

Just for completeness’s sake, the other Wallace quotation Roiphe
uses, from Infinite Jest, runs like this: “He had never once
had actual intercourse on marijuana. Frankly, the idea repelled
him…. ”

Now-aside from the question “how about when not on
marijuana?”-it should be said that Infinite Jest is a long
book, featuring many characters who use all manner of drugs. So at
first I wondered if this was Hal being disgusted by the idea of
doing it on weed, or maybe his pal Pemulis. Turns out this line is
from the opening section on Ken Erdedy. The guy who smokes so much
pot that we re-meet him hundreds of pages later in a halfway house.
This is not a fair shot at the putatively sexless literary kids
these days. It’s not even a representational view of the erotic as
it works in Infinite Jest. Also, for what it’s worth: this
line occurs on Page 22 of the book, and describes a rather minor
character.

If you can tolerate the most vague of Infinite Jest
spoilers, I’ll say that, hundreds of pages later, you can see Don
Gately take some very decisive, hero-type action that you would be
hard-pressed to square with Roiphe’s blanket line: “Even the
mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly
hopeful, overly earnest or politically unÂ­toward.” (Greater
earnestness, as it happens, is a virtue that Wallace pushes most of
the sympathetic characters in Infinite Jesttoward.)
And, while being transported to the hospital after the incident in
question, the fact that Gately has enough presence of mind to sneak
a peek underneath Joelle Van Dyne’s veil: there’s simply nothing
sexless about this moment. Or about the film-within-the-novel that
gives the book its title (along with Hamlet, obvs).

These plot elements do what Roiphe rightly celebrates Updike et
al for doing when they are at their best-“These passages are after
several things at once-sadness, titillation, beauty, fear, comedy,
disappointment, aspiration.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say that
if you don’t get lustfully moved by Gately’s desire for Joelle Van
Dyne, or if you fail to understand her equal and abiding desire to
get it on with Gately as she exhorts their fellow addicts to help
her drag him to the car already-it might just be the case that you,
the reader, have yet to get properly did in the bedroom.

As a side-note: Before one stays up all night writing something
like this instead of sleeping, it might be useful to ask, “When is
a much-celebrated writer worth sticking up for? More people love
and respect Wallace’s writing than will ever know my name, or
likely Roiphe’s. So who cares?”

When it comes to someone like Mailer, it always seems silly to
take up a collection for his defense-since, in his own books and
essays, he takes up his own cause pretty reliably. Though it is
obviously different with a writer like Wallace. Self-aggrandizing
beef isn’t really present as an ingredient in his journalism or his
fiction. He was brave and brainy-one could even say virile-as a
writer. Plenty of his sentences wow men and women alike with their
hyper-endowment on the level of porny 48WTF?-cup tits or 12-inch
cocks.

And this is why I suppose I care. Despite all his literary
physiognomy, Wallace wasn’t the kind of brawling dick-swinger to go
around saying “Who’s the champ? Who’s the champ? I’ll take on all
comers” all the time. And just because this wasn’t the case doesn’t
somehow make him a writer who is “too cool” for eroticism, as
Roiphe wants to claim. Wallace may have been a (merciful) break
from the primping pageantry of a prior era’s literary bodybuilding,
especially when compared to your average “imma drop 1,000 pages
in yo face” novelist. But, contra Roiphe, Wallace was also a
lover, even through the pharmacological fog of his treatments for
depression-which included, at various points, electro-shock. (Also?
I’ve heard in commercials that even the lower-wattage approach to
managing depression can sometimes mess with a person’s sexual
drive, at times? But maybe we can let this one go.)